Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Thinking about everything and sure of nothing

The headline I just wrote might sound like a negative, but it's not. Hofstadter's book, which is literally in a class by itself, reaches out in thought to music, art, biology, writing, religion... and all the rest of it, all through the lens of the proof of Godel's incompleteness theorem, which is about the inability of proving something about a system from within the system. And that, to my mind, is pretty much everything there is to say about 'mind'. What else can I say? I was a 24-year-old with a B.A. in English and no math since High School algebra II when I read this book now I'm a PhD in mathematics, and I use this book in a first year seminar.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

A Definite Must Read

This is a very thought provoking book. When you have finished it's 700+ pages you will feel as if you have gone through an entire year's worth of courses. It touches on art, philosophy, artificial intelligence, mathematics, and ascetics. It is a journey through cognition that I have never encountered before. Hofstadter is truly a genius. My only complaints are that he can be a bit long winded, and the reading becomes dry. But the read is deffinatley worth it. This book changed my life.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

A book that will teach you more than you can imagine.

I'll start with two things. First, I've yet to even finish. Second, I already know this book is one of the most important I've ever read.

This book is a mountain to climb through, don't start unless you're willing to get into something big. Be prepared to spend alot of time thinking about it before you understand, and don't aim to read it as fast as you can. Read a chapter a day and you're good.

The book is almost impossible to describe in terms of what it is about. It talks about a little of everything. Brains, Zen, Math, Language, computers and artificial intelligence, you will learn about everything.

I know this review wasn't as detailed as it could have been, but there were none before and that was a shame, and I'm low on time.

What it boils down to is this, I cannot possible give a review that would describe what this book is, but take me at my word when I say it is one of the most important books out there.

Godel Escher Bach

Excellent. Extraordinary. Highest recommendation.

0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

I can't claim I fully grokked all of it.

I imagine that would take a true renaissance man, but it was a lifesaver for me during my discrete structures course.

Must Read

One of the best books ever written.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Brilliant lay introduction to Goedel's Theorem

Goedel's Theorem may be the most universally unappreciated result of 20th Century mathematics -- at least equal in importance to Einstein's relativity. Considering that most of us still live in Newton's clockwork universe, wound up and set to running down by an absent God ages ago, considering that most of us still struggle with the long division that bedevilled Samuel Pepys, considering that almost no one understands that mathematics has been fully modern since well before Beethoven, the sheer anaesthetic distance of Goedel's math from modern minds is hardly surprising. Hofstadter's analysis of the implications are fun, deep and finally laborious -- but from his efforts finally emerge a realization that Goedel proved the unknowability of 'ultimate' truth, and perhaps also some appreciation of a corollary, that in the hands of a master logician, or an unscrupulous one, no system of ethical thought whatsoever is immune to being stretched to the point of damning self-parody. In a world dominated by 'simple' fundamentalisms, the triumph of decent agnosticism - while hardly won - is a worthy note of hope.

Eternal Golden Braid - Finally, Truth in Advertising!

Science and art have never been less accessible. They have become obscure private languages, requiring rites of initiation and proficiency in coding and decoding. But while art has largely remained the preserve of an elite - science has been popularized by both its practitioners and a host of talented observers and reporters. The reason is that science is all-pervasive while art is still a museum thing. In the genre of popular science there is nothing that comes close to this book. It combines music and literature with formal logic and computer science. It is poetic while being rigorous, breathless without deteriorating to pseudo-science. In short: a masterpiece. The book strives - and succeeds - to demonstrate that ostensibly disparate phenomena like ant colonies, Bach's music, the structure and functioning of the brain, and programming languages - have more in common than we imagine. Uncovering these strains of similarity and strands of common order is done in a systematic but highly entertaining manner. The book is as taut as a thriller and as fun as 'Alice in Wonderland' that it so often quotes. A treat untouched by the almost three decades that elapsed since it was first published. Sam Vaknin, author of 'Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited'.

Brilliant, thought provoking, all-encompassing

Godel, Escher, Bach is a brilliant book. It will lead you on a journey through logic, mathematics, physics, biology, music, art, artificial intelligence etc. The dialogues between the chapters are simply exquisite, with layer upon layer of meaning. The book is not very easy, but I could not stop reading.

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